An article about Vostok financial situation. (
http://mywatch.ru/forum/index.php?showtopic=6750). Notice: I cannot verify this information, it is attributed to a Tatarstan newspaper and republished on a reputable Russian watch forum.
The main points, as far as I understood, are:
- Significant proportion of Vostok production was commissioned by car producers. When the crisis in 2008 began, these commissions all but stopped.
- The Ministry of Defense launched a bid for watches for the army - the new ZAKAZ. Vostok won the lion's share of this bid and invested lots of money for designing new watches and buying new machines.
- The Ministry of Defense did not transfer the money in time, and Vostok failed to pay its taxes in due course. For a relatively minor debts of 5 800 000 rubles (2-300 000 USD), a procedure of bancrupcy was launched.
- The Ministry of Defense sent the first installment on Sept 15, and Vostok was able to pay its debts, but the bankruptcy procedure was launched anyway. Tzivilin, Vostok director, resigned.
- The author suspects that somebody - with the help of the Russian Ministry of Defense, which did not transfer the money before Tzivilin's resignation, and the tax authorities which launched bankruptcy procedure for a relatively minor debt, and did not stop it when the debt was paid - intends to acquire the billions' USD worth of Vostok assets for peanuts.
Again, Russian is not my mother language and I cannot verify this info. Hope some native speaker will help.
